I have a grand son who is eight months old .I have been observing his behavior.Till a few weeks back he has been all smiles excepting when he was hungry.He seemed to have an inner reservoir of happiness which was gushing out in smiles despite what is happening around him or who picks him up.
Now he has started moving on his stomach towards objects.When he starts moving , he goes backwards, unable to grasp the object of his attention and starts crying.
The child is the same, objects remain what they were;yet he has started crying while a few months earlier when he never attempted the present maneuver,never went after objects, was smiling.
Now the situation and his reaction has changed.
Earlier he has been accepting things for what they were and never had an idea/made an attempt to acquire the object;he did not have the desire for acquisition or he did not expect any thing.He was happy.
This is the essence of Life.Leave things as they are.Do what you feel like doing with an innocent child’s mind of about 6 months and you shall remain happy.
One must know there is nothing that can be changed by you.If think so, it is an illusion.You may argue with this point.But experience shall tell you the Truth as mentioned above.
Nor can you change people.
The closest person to you is yourself.Have you listened to yourself and changed?
Things are what they are and you are what you are.
This does not mean inaction.This means non action.That is, you perform a task because it ought to be performed knowing pretty well that you are only one factor in completing a task whether it is brushing teeth or earning money.Many other forces that are not in your control have roles to play.If you worry about results you shall be impairing the efficiency of the only factor, that is you, that is in your control, thus reducing the overall efficiency of factors that lead to completion of an act.
So do the best and leave it at that, whether it be a task or relation ships.This is the secret of Happiness.Now Read on….
DISCONNECTS BETWEEN EXPECTATIONS AND EXPERIENCE
I would argue further that the reason many of my forewarned patients report to me the experience wasn’t as bad as they expected was precisely because I warned them it would be bad. Though I’ve used a medical example here, the impact of any disconnect between our expectations and our experience is felt in almost all contexts. Our expectations of our experiences dramatically color not just how we experience waiting for them but the experiences themselves. Four scenarios exist regarding expectations and experiences. We can have:
1. Low expectations and a poor experience, where our low expectations can mute the disappointment or even the discomfort we feel at actually having a poor experience.
2. Low expectations but a good experience, leading to a pleasant surprise.
3. High expectations and good experience, in which we get to enjoy not only the anticipation of looking forward to something fabulous but an experience that actually lives up to our expectations and therefore feels thoroughly satisfying.
4. High expectations but a poor experience, in which we often emerge bitterly disappointed or even traumatized.
THE BEST STRATEGY
The “gain” at which we set our expectations tends to be more a matter of habit and disposition than conscious intention for most of us. Some of us expect little, perhaps as a way to defend against disappointment, accepting the cost of a muted or absent anticipatory sense of joy. Others of us can’t help having high expectations, basking consistently in the glow of anticipation but often paying a different price: the painful disappointment that comes when experiences fail to live up to those high expectations. Even worse, sometimes having unrealistically high expectations prevent us from being able to enjoy our experiences at all.
I honestly don’t think one strategy is better than another but rather that different strategies are better suited for different types of people. If you observe yourself to be continually disappointed by experiences you feel you should be able to enjoy, you may do better by consciously lowering your expectations somewhat. Likewise, if your expectations remain so consistently low you never think things will work out for you, you may find yourself plagued by a gloomy pessimism that blocks you from savoring a truly enjoyable part of life—the anticipation of good things—and you might work on allowing yourself to expect just a little more.
Though we all may have a built-in set point at which we unconsciously tend to set our expectations, that doesn’t prevent us from consciously grabbing the reins and adjusting them up or down to suit our needs. Certainly it would be ideal if our expectations always perfectly matched our experiences, but as the quality of many experiences is hard to predict, we might do better to adjust our expectation of how much we think we’ll enjoy or dislike an experience based more on how we know those expectations will affect us than on how accurate we may think they’ll turn out to be.
My own personal preference is to know up front as much as I can about both good and bad experiences coming my way. For me—and, I’ve observed, for many others—not knowing what’s coming when anticipating something bad creates even more anxiety than having full knowledge of how bad what’s coming will be. Knowing the limits of the “badness” I’ll be facing enables me to focus on preparing for it rather than on managing my imagination’s tendency to inflate it beyond all rational proportion. For me at least, the devil I don’t know is far worse than the devil I do.
Though soon after the anesthesiologist left our room for the last time my wife and I had both become resigned to having a different experience than we’d expected, after our son was born (perfectly healthy) we received another surprise: my wife’s left-sided pain actually became worse, located now not low in her pelvis where her uterus was appropriately contracting down to staunch any bleeding, but rather high up in the left upper quadrant of her abdomen where it had absolutely no business being. When I glanced worriedly at our obstetrician she only shrugged in confusion. The anesthesiologist was called back in one last time, gave my wife a narcotic, and the pain finally faded away, never to return. To this day, however, my wife regards the last five hours of her labor as one of the worst experiences of her life. The only thing that saved the day was that it was followed immediately by one of the best.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/happiness-in-world/201003/the-danger-having-unrealistic-expectations
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